Peter Murphy Pre-Publication Archive
This is a pre-publication article. It is provided for researcher browsing and quick reference. The final
published version of the article is available at:
Peter Murphy, ‘Bureaucratic Capitalism and the Work of Cornelius Castoriadis’, in Vrasidas Karalis (ed.)
Cornelius Castoriadis and Radical Democracy, pp. 137-157 (Leiden: Brill, 2014).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004278585_010
1
Bureaucratic Capitalism
Peter Murphy
Cornelius Castoriadis was a leftist. Throughout his life he identified with left-wing
causes. He began youthful political life as a Communist-turned-Trotskyist. In exile in France he
moved to a kind of independent leftism that began with a trenchant critique of Jean-Paul
Sartre's apologetics for Communism and mutated into a vision of a non-bureaucratic selfmanaged society. For a time Castoriadis thought of the benchmark society as ‘socialism’ but he
eventually stopped using that term and opted to talk instead about an ‘autonomous society’. It
was never entirely clear what Castoriadis meant by autonomy. He didn’t quite mean the
autonomous individual of John Stuart Mill’s liberal society. His concept of autonomy referred
more to a society than an individual. An autonomous society was one capable of self-critique. It
contained individuals who were capable of criticizing the society they were members of. An
autonomous society was one that could re-invent itself in a deep-going way with new laws and
practices.
That was very much the left-wing Castoriadis. But there is another Castoriadis, one who
is less obvious but also less obviously a left-winger. There are several threads in Castoriadis’
thought that have a right-wing resonance. For one thing, Castoriadis thought of autonomy not
only in terms of critique, which is a left-wing platitude, but also in terms of creation which has
much wider and more interesting significance. Since Schumpeter, many conservatives have
strongly identified with capitalism’s process of creative destruction. 1 Furthermore Castoriadis
identified the well-spring of creativity with the West, hardly a standard left-wing nostrum. He
thought (correctly) that autonomous societies were a function of the Greco-Western tradition.
He understood very clearly that the larger part of high-level human creation, not least the arts
and sciences, were produced by a relative small band of Western societies. He attributed that
to their relative autonomy. They encouraged at their peak critical people who not only
2
questioned the laws of society (as well as the laws of science and the laws of art) but who also
possessed a love of creation—an eros of making, innovating, and bringing-into-being.
Contra-wise, Castoriadis was no fan of Third World politics.2 While anti-colonial thirdworld-ism became popular in the 1960s and 1970s, Castoriadis kept a skeptical distance from it.
This was a movement that he knew could only end in tears. He was not wrong. Castoriadis was
also a defender of the institution of the family.3 He expressed a deeply skeptical view of
feminism.4 Finally there is the testy matter of capitalism. In some ways Castoriadis was a
conventional leftist. This was true of his view of capitalism: capitalism is bad. He started out
with the view that capitalism is bad because it generates alienation. Later he thought it was bad
because it lacked an internal limit. Capitalist economies grow. Economic growth is the most
powerfully legitimating force of capitalist societies. Growth equals prosperity equals legitimacy.
What is not to like about that? In the past two hundred years, capitalism has improved the
living standard of many societies 15-20 times over. It has lifted five out of the six billion of the
world’s population out of a fate that previously had caused almost everyone to live on $2 a day
or less. Most twentieth-century intellectuals ignored the power of that achievement.
Castoriadis did too. He took the view that growth lacked limits. Whatever lacks a limit, a peras,
will end in grief. Growth is a kind of ancient Greek tragedy. It is hubris de-personified. The
person with hubris knows not when to stop. That was the lesson of ancient drama. Christianity
made roughly the same point. Pride was the cause of human downfall. Those who are proud do
not see what is in front of them. Pride blinds and terrible mistakes follow. The same, Castoriadis
reasoned, applied to society.
Capitalism is often equated with greed. Greed is a variation on the flaw of hubris and
the sin of pride. The greedy person doesn’t know when to stop eating or accumulating money.
There is never enough. Castoriadis’ view of capitalism as an economic system without an
internal limit suggested it was an impersonal version of greed. Capitalism’s excess would lead to
its own extinction. But the caricature of capitalism as the plaything of fat cats and bloated
plutocrats has never been convincing. In fact it is not true that capitalism lacks an internal limit.
Conventional leftism, represented by Karl Marx, supposed that capitalism expanded until it fell
into crisis and that crisis would lead to Communism. Castoriadis, however, was very skeptical of
3
Marx. For a decade Castoriadis worked as a professional economist in the OECD in Paris. At the
same time, he produced an extensive critique of Marx’s economics. Critique is probably the
right word. For although Castoriadis criticized Marx, he also carried over certain assumptions
from Marx, principally that growth was a linear (progressive or regressive) phenomenon. Things
grew larger, problems accumulated, capitalism experienced crisis. The history of both the
nineteenth and twentieth century suggested this was in part true but that capitalism was in fact
not linear but cyclical. One of the three greatest economists of the twentieth century, Joseph
Schumpeter, made cycles central to his economics.5 Cyclical analysis supposes that capitalism
expands and contracts and expands and contracts and expands and so on. As such, it has limits
built into it. In this respect, it functions a bit like a diaphragm. It expands and reaches a limit
and contracts and reaches a limit and expands and reaches a limit and so on.
It was not only nineteenth-century liberals who were captivated by the Enlightenment
idea of progress; so were most socialists. Yet despite the entrenchment of the notion of
progress, much about modern societies does not move in straight lines but rather in loops. The
ring, the circle, the old-fashioned revolving revolution, the cyclical rotation—all of these notions
better describe certain aspects of modern capitalist societies than does the idea that society or
its sub-systems are linear, additive or cumulative in whatever direction one might imagine, be it
forwards, backwards, up or down. In an economic cycle, what is going down is already latently
preparing for the path upwards. That is not to say that in a modern society there are no longterm linear phenomena to be observed. Over two hundred plus years of modern industrial
capitalism, successful capitalist societies have over the long course trended upwards in real
wealth per capita. Yet that broadly linear development has been ironically progressed by
cyclical mechanisms, one of whose functions is to destroy outmoded types of wealth and
wealth creation. The modern dynamic loop or cycle is in fact also a spiral. Creative destruction
is the internal limit of creative expansion. Yet it is also the condition of the possibility of further,
greater and better creation. Each step forward thus requires a partial step back. Each looping,
spiraling partial step backwards is also a trigger for a spiraling loop whose down-slope is
simultaneously an up-slope. Figuratively speaking, the modern capitalist imaginary is an Escherlike image. You may think you are going in one direction; but actually you are going in the other
4
direction. Or rather you are going in both directions at the same time. Naturally this makes
economic forecasting, among other things, difficult.
The ambidextrous logic of capitalism means though that Castoriadis was right to
question modern rationalism even if he was wrong to suggest that modern capitalism was a
function of modern rationalism and that the periodic crises of capitalism betrayed the pseudorationality of modern reason. He had two criticisms of rationalism. One, the most important,
was that you cannot explain the imagination—and thus all forms of human invention—on the
basis of reason alone. This is true. Castoriadis developed this proposition in his earliest writings
from the 1940s, in his commentary on Max Weber. Like most intellectuals of the time,
Castoriadis spent a lot of time commenting on Karl Marx in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet his more
important if often implicit interlocutor was Weber. He rightly intuited that Weber was a much
more significant thinker than Marx. Castoriadis took issue with Weber’s view from the early
20th century that the success of modern societies could be explained by the process of
rationalization. Reason applied to social processes made them more functional and thus more
productive. Castoriadis countered that each society has its form of reason that is posited by
that society’s collective imagination. Thus the imagination of a certain kind of modern society
had discovered how to rationalize. This type of society was capitalist and imbued with a work
ethic, most commonly a Protestant work ethic. Off-shoots from such societies spun outwards
from North-western Europe after the era of the Renaissance. The rationalizing form of reason,
which was demonstrably a modern form of reason, had powerful social applications in
industries, markets and more generally in modern institutions. Castoriadis insisted though that
rationalization also had its negatives.
The first of these negatives was that the reason of rationalization obscured the function
of the collective imagination. This was part of a larger criticism that Castoriadis repeated many
times: namely that most societies, both modern and traditional, occluded imagination in favor
some kind of social power, be it ritual or reason that drugged the imagination and put it to
sleep. In a way Castoriadis was right. The driving force of modern industrial capitalist societies is
the imagination. It produces very high levels of innovation and invention. The national income
of many societies is as much as 20 times higher in real terms than it was two hundred years
5
ago. There is no precedent for this in history. Life expectancy, housing, education, disposable
income, transport and comfort levels have risen multiple times in these societies. To do this,
these societies unleashed an avalanche of innovation. Moreover, and possibly more crucially,
they set in train an expectation of perpetual innovation. Time and again they raised
productivity and increased efficiency. Sometimes this was done by rationalization but the
greatest developments happened by acts of imagination. They created new products and
processes, new technologies and aesthetics. Castoriadis does not link creativity and productivity
but he does foreground the act of creation. He does see it as socially central. He may disparage
growth but he also theorizes its engine. He might not have Schumpeter’s sense of how much
modern industrial capitalism relies on creation but even more than Schumpeter he locates
creation at the heart of the modern social drama.
The second of the negatives that Castoriadis raised concerning rationalization was more
ambivalent. He suggested that modern societies equated reason with rationalization,
rationalization with development, development with growth, and growth with numeric size.
From that long chain, a tacit formula emerges that equates bigger with better and better with
more.6 One has to be cautious with this second criticism. Sometimes it is true that more is not
better. It perfectly correct, as Castoriadis argued, that more scientific publications or more
people with PhDs is not ipso facto better. Yet, sometimes, more is better. If a population
increases, then economic growth to produce more jobs to meet that population increase is
better than not having economic growth. There is an irony lurking here. The Weberian ethic—
the Protestant ethic—assumed that less is more. By being more austere, by trimming waste,
cutting slack, reducing expenditure, a company and an economy could grow. Austerity led to
riches. Many left-wing critics of rationalization criticized riches in the name of an austere view
of the world. They responded to Protestant asceticism with their own brand of asceticism. The
Weberian capitalist was ascetic in order to paradoxically produce wealth, a non-ascetic
condition. The radical anti-capitalist criticized wealth produced by development and growth on
the basis that it offended their ascetic sensibility. Castoriadis was more nuanced this, though.
There is a streak of left-wing asceticism in him, the negative theology of a Marx who denounced
the Moses of accumulation. But he mixes this, or over-determines it, with the view that
6
expansion is hubris. It betrays a deluded human sense of omnipotence, of the human God-like
ambition for infinity, infinite possibility, and unlimited acquisition. What makes human beings
human is a sense of limits. We cannot grow something infinitely. An economic boom will not
last forever. The growth of any company is not unlimited. The wealth of any individual will not
expand forever. The richest person today will not be the richest person tomorrow. Our
knowledge of anything does not progress infinitely. We cannot know everything about
ourselves or others. The world around us is not completely transparent. Our society and our
morals are not perfect. Human beings are not perfectible. We are not gods. Our society is not
transcendent. Our domination of nature is not absolute. 7 That means, as Castoriadis reasonably
insisted, that no society can grow indefinitely.8 But that also—ironically—is the essence of
capitalism. For capitalism is cyclical. It is ambidextrous. It supposes that what grows shrinks. But
also that shrinkage presages growth. What is interesting about capitalism is not growth or
shrinkage but the super-position of the two. Shrinkage is the limit of growth that is also the
precursor of growth.
One can read the Weberian Protestant ethic in these terms, but it is not necessary to
do so. Unsurprisingly when Weber and Schumpeter met, they argued. 9 Presumably this was
partly a function of ego. But equally it was a function of world view. As Castoriadis understood,
and here his insight really shines and far exceeds the usual left-wing mumble, the Weberian
Protestant ethic represents not just the driver of capitalism or its productive limit; it is also (in
one late-appearing version) a negation of capitalism and creation. It is easy to understand, in no
small measure thanks to Max Weber, how the relatively austere nature of Protestantism
explains the mountainous riches of modern capitalism, especially when the Protestant ethic
was translated and refigured in the American context. Even if the Renaissance invented doubleentry book-keeping, Protestant religious budgeting amplified and elucidated capitalist
economic budgeting. It subtly encouraged individuals and companies to do more with less.
Christianity is a religion of paradox.10 The paradox of religious budgeting lent the modern
economic concept of productivity its essence and its power. Productivity is a function of the
paradox that less is more. It is an exceptionally potent driver of modern economies. At the
same time, every improvement in productivity in a modern economy eventually exhausts itself.
7
What is today’s innovation is tomorrow’s norm. So that the ‘less’ that produces ‘more’
(eventually) produces ‘less’. And so the cycle goes, on and on. But significantly, as Castoriadis
observed in writings in the 1950s and 1960s, rationalization also produces another nonproductive kind of capitalism—bureaucratic capitalism—that far from driving the cycle of
growth-shrinkage-growth leads to a slow asphyxiation and self-cannibalization of capitalism as
a productive system and the emergence of multiple parasitic classes and parasitic offices and
processes within modern societies.11
Before examining the phenomenon of bureaucratic capitalism more closely, some
political context is important. I noted previously that Castoriadis began political life as a
Trotskyist. This is not just a curiosity. There was a generation or two of twentieth-century
thinkers who, like Castoriadis, at the start of their political lives had brief spells as Trotsykists
and then moved on—many of them to become standard-bearers of the intellectual and political
right. A good portion of the first generation of American neo-conservatives falls into this
category.12 Why is this important? Trotsky was one of an endless stream of tyrannical and
authoritarian figures that Russian politics produced—and has continued to produce to this day.
The thing that made him odd though was not that he was purged by Stalin but that he lived
long enough to create a critique of Stalin that had one interesting characteristic. It charged that
Stalin ruined the Russian Revolution by creating a parasitic bureaucratic caste personified by
the dictator. Most who passed quickly through Trotskyism grasped that Trotsky had the same
tyrannical traits as Stalin and realized the Russian Revolution was a tyranny from day one.
However they saw some validity in the theory of the parasitic bureaucratic caste. This theory
helped explain the Soviet-era nomenclatura. Some Trotskyists suggested that communist
bureaucracies would eventually acquire capitalist traits. This went a long way to explaining the
survival of the Communist Party in China, which managed to successfully transition China from
a totalitarian command economy in the direction of authoritarian bureaucratic capitalism.
Trotskyist intuitions about bureaucratic parasites were also helpful in explaining some of the
less-than-healthy characteristics developing in capitalist societies in the twentieth-century
West. This was underlined by James Burnham in his 1941 book The Managerial Revolution.
Burnham was an American Trotskyist apostate who became in short order a National Review
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paleo-conservative.13 The essence of his view was that managers were becoming a new ruling
class. This extrapolated from what Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means had observed in their 1932
study The Modern Corporation and Private Property, namely that the ownership and the control
of companies were separating. What Berle and Means, and later Burnham, observed was
arguably the consequence of the procedural rationality, the processes of rationalization that
Weber observed in the early twentieth century. In this moment, the methodical nature of the
Protestant ethic was producing not paradox but a kind of suffocating step-by-step process that
everyone would soon start to recognize as bureaucratization. As bureaucracy spread in modern
organizations, control was substituted for command. Rule was replaced by rules; obedience by
compliance; direction by method; and initiative by system. This was the source of the
ubiquitous world of paper work, a world in which information could become a technology, a
system and a science. In this world, form was replaced by paperwork forms.
Burnham astutely figured out that the supposedly impersonal procedures of managers
represented a very personal claim on power. 14 They wanted to rule in place of others while
claiming they were doing no such thing. They used rules to rule. The Burnham thesis in turn
influenced the neo-conservative theory of the new class in the 1960s. 15 Neo-conservative
writers in that era observed the rapid expansion of a new imperious class of the tertiaryeducated that—streaming out of universities, their heads filled with all sorts of social
ideology—began capturing the state, enlarging it, and driving the expansion of unsustainable
entitlement programs and all manner of bureaucratic law. They too wished to rule by rules.
They proceeded forthwith to make up the rules that others were supposed to live by. This was a
project of the political left not of the political right. In the mind of the left, procedural rules
equaled the state equaled the public good. The rest was capitalism which was the public bad.
Castoriadis never wavered from a nominal identification with the political left. He espoused all
the requisite conventional ritual-sounding criticisms of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan
in the 1980s.16 Yet for all that he was still an unorthodox type of character. He was savage in his
criticism of Soviet tyranny and unstinting in his repudiation of leftists, and that meant most of
them, who defended the Soviet Union explicitly or implicitly right until the day it died.
Castoriadis also recognized very early on the pathological phenomenon of bureaucratic
9
capitalism. From the late forties to the mid sixties he was a member of the French intellectual
group Socialism or Barbarism. This group was persistently critical of the bureaucratization of
modern society and it argued at length for a self-managed society that was not reliant on
behemoth bureaucracies. Castoriadis had a distinctive frame of mind.
So
what—in
Castoriadis’
view—made
bureaucratic
capitalism
a
delinquent
phenomenon? Much of his critique reads and feels like standard left-wing discourse of the
time; much of this discourse would become the platitudes of the nineteen seventies. Yet at the
same there is something else in Castoriadis’ work, something that transcends the clichés of the
time. Both the standard and the non-standard critiques of bureaucratic capitalism are
interwoven in his 1960 Socialism or Barbarism study ‘Modern Capitalism and Revolution’.17 At
that point in time, he observed that bureaucracy had become the logic of contemporary
society, its response to everything.18 He saw bureaucratization in a fairly conventional sense—
as the management of activity by hierarchical apparatuses. These had become omnipresent—in
production, in the state, in consumption, leisure and scientific research. He offered the leftwing cliché that bureaucracies manipulate human beings: the apparatuses of sales, advertising,
and market research manipulate human needs and that, through the bureaucratization of press
and radio and the universities, culture and science had become similarly organized. 19 He alludes
(first) to the Berle and Means’ theory that owners had been replaced by managers and (second)
to the syndicalist theory that bureaucratization had separated the direction of production from
its execution.20 What follows from the latter is instrumentalisation. Human beings become a
means to the end of production.21 Workers are reduced to the position of tool-like executants.
This is Marx’s theory of alienated labor read through Kantian philosophical categories. Again it
was standard fare by the nineteen seventies, and hardly conceptually original in the nineteen
fifties. What followed from this, in the eyes of Castoriadis and many others, was the idea that
workers who were reduced to taking orders and denied intrinsic satisfaction at work found
alternate satisfaction in income and promotion and status distinctions. In the nineteen sixties, a
thousand theories of alienation bloomed. All owed something to the early Marx. All said the
same thing.
10
And so did Castoriadis. Yet he also said something different. He offered a view that
suggested that bureaucratization was also something other than Kantian-Marxian alienation. It
was actually a loss of meaning. Bureaucratization is more than simply the generation of
hierarchical apparatuses, or the separation of direction and execution, or the cleavage of
ownership and direction, or the turning human beings and their needs into instruments. In fact,
truth told, all of those things came before what twentieth-century commentators began to call
the bureaucratization of the world. Bureaucratization may or may not be connected with those
things that so rattled the cage of the nineteen sixties. But it is also distinct from them. It stands
apart from them. For bureaucratization at its core is an inversion of meaning. If all societies
require the production of meaning, then bureaucratization can be best understood as the
production of nonsense. There are various ways of producing nonsense. Hierarchies, alienation,
and instrumentalisation are all capable (to a degree) of producing nonsense. But neither do
they or their effects explain the pervasive way in which all aspects of society became subject in
the twentieth century to bureaucratic logic, or more precisely to bureaucratic illogic.
The pseudo-logic of the bureaucratic society is tantamount to the emptying out of
meaning. It produces vacuity. It is a kind of logic or reason that, as it unfolds, becomes illogical
and unreasonable. If logic or reason is supposed to explain something, then bureaucratic logic
makes things, while logical, inexplicable. An explanation is one of the key things by which
human beings create meaning. If something does not make sense, then a basic response of all
human beings is to ask for an explanation. In a bureaucratized society or institution, you will get
an explanation—however the explanation will not make sense. Those who offer the
explanation, often members of an apparatus, speak as if an explanation is forthcoming from
them and yet manage to say nothing at all or else not anything that other human beings regard
as intrinsically meaningful. Twentieth-century societies developed a rich language to describe
this impoverished manner of speaking. They learnt to call it spin, verbiage, waffle,
gobbledygook, flimflam, guff, blather, drivel, and so on. They learnt to recognize that most
people in offices, not least those in high offices, spoke this language. They found that some
people managed not to speak in bureaucratic riddles but that these were the exception not the
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rule. The tradition of plain-speaking, directness and forthrightness progressively disappeared as
the world became bureaucratized.22
Bureaucratic language tells us a lot about bureaucratic modernity. It suggests that
bureaucratization is more than a function of rationalization, even if in part it is also that. It is
clear that rationalization does generate bureaucratization. As procedural rationality spread
through the course of the twentieth century, the response of organizational actors to problems
changed. Rather than fix a problem directly, they opted for the indirect approach. They began
to prefer to create a new procedure when-ever a new problem occurred. Procedural rationality
pointed human beings away from the personal to the impersonal. No longer did anyone stuff
up. Instead any fault and any correction of a fault was the result of rules, methods, and
procedures. This had a crushing effect on individual responsibility and on the substantive
outcomes of organized human action. Organizations henceforth thought of improvement as
procedural change. Every act of problem-solving generated new procedures. The shift from
‘ownership’ to ‘management’ was a symptom of the dominance of procedural rationality. Its
rise generated additional offices and multiplied functions. The creation, transmission and
implementation of procedures required endless additional staff, resources and time. The
resulting bureaus swamped organizations and the larger society with a tsunami of rules,
handbooks, processes, plans, steps, guidelines, and policies. These were universally written in
an awkward language that was pseudo-juridical and empty.
Resources were re-allocated to rule generation and compliance. As the mid-20th century
fascination with ‘planning’ was to show, outcomes were sacrificed to processes. Castoriadis was
right to dub procedural rationality as a kind of pseudo-rational mastery. It constantly assures
organizations that they are doing something when they are not. Procedures encourage the
simulation of action. If one has a plan, then one can claim to have done something. Procedural
rationality elicits ersatz, pretend, fake and mock action. As bureaucracy spreads, more and
more people devote their working lives to producing, auditing, and reporting on fake action.
Massive documents and weighty folders are testament to the endless plans of action that are
never realized. These are matched by the suffocating reality of multitudinous procedures that
break down everything—from science and industry to entertainment and learning—into
12
fictitious analytic chunks designed to be governed by rules. Every step in these procedures is
accompanied by forms, assessments, approvals, and reviews. Each of these demands resources,
staff, and time.
Industrial modernity and its passion for productive innovation unleashed a huge
quantum of uncertainty. Contingency was its child. Procedure, method and analysis promised
that contingency could be mastered. But it couldn’t be. Such mastery is illusionary. No amount
of procedural specification can eliminate the unknown and the uncertain. So in every
department of modern life unexpected problems appear. Bad contingencies arise. Accidents
happen. Follies abound, unabated by rules. However it is not only the illusion of procedural
rationality that inspires bureaucracy. Procedural reason supposes that problems can be solved
or forestalled by methodical rules. This though assumes that problems in themselves are
unproblematic. That is not the case. For the greatest source of bureaucratization in the last
century has been the vast effort to rationalize non-problems. Procedural reason supposes that
dangerous behaviors can be obviated prospectively or retrospectively by good procedures. That
supposes in turn that it is a straightforward matter to identify problem behaviors. It is not. In
fact, the trend of the last century has been to identify an endless array of non-problems as
problems, and then to devise methods, rules, processes, offices, functions, and agencies to deal
with them. This happens in a way that seems remarkably easy. A few very vocal people sound
off about a non-problem. That attracts an audience. The audience evolves into a lobby. The
lobby gets a trial measure to deal with the non-problem. The measure devolves into
regulations, rules, taxes, norms, policies, and plans. Offices, departments, bureaus, branches,
units, and working groups are set up to promulgate and administer these. Reviews, reports,
audits, inspections, checks, and assessments follow.
The greatest time and attention in a bureaucratic committee is always given over to the
least important topic of discussion. Such committees will spend much more time discussing the
name of a new building than they will in devising measures to deal with a devastating budget
deficit engulfing their institution. Likewise in the choice of problems, a bureaucratic society
devotes most of its attention not to serious problems but to specious non-problems. It
gravitates to non-problems like global climate cooling or warming or the industrial emission of
13
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere or the use of fossil fuels in automobiles. War and
depression seem inconsequential in comparison. Of course the drive of bureaucratic societies is
to make non-problems seem super-consequential. That is their curious nature. In these
societies non-problems come to possess fake significance. They emit bogus urgency. They
generate mock meaning. They give rise to faux crises and ersatz outpourings of human
emotion. While they may be all sound and fury signifying nothing, nonetheless accompanying
them always is a flood of fatuous language that implores human beings to take the nonproblem seriously. Evidence is marshaled, polemics deployed, and arguments unleashed. The
more bogus a problem, the greater is the weight of sententious opinion. That is why
bureaucratic societies, though they are very procedural and are filled with empty methodical
language games, are also aggressively moralizing. Moralizers aim barrages of ‘oughts, shoulds
and musts’ at those who refuse to believe in the spurious weightiness of non-problems and
who refuse to spend their time dignifying ridiculous topics with gravitas. The function of the
moralizer is to ‘prove’ that what is silly is important. Thus we get from institutions in
bureaucratic societies an onslaught of self-important language. It is engorged with a sense of its
own significance yet conveys at the same time a distinct sense of its own absurdity and
emptiness. It is barren, it is bare, and it is blank while it thinks of itself in the very opposite
terms.
Castoriadis’ gift was to give a name to the larger syndrome that generates an endless
stream of prattle, claptrap and blather from social institutions. He pointed to a kind of
capitalism that did not just produce hierarchy, alienation or instrumentalisation but that
produced meaninglessness. Its agents said things, and did things, and undertook things that
were hollow. Its endeavors, if looked at closely, were pointless. Castoriadis often fell back on
older explanations of what was going on. He would talk about the body of managers who
prepared or directed the work of others in the production process.23 But Kant and Marx did not
really illuminate this new phase of capitalism. For what distinguished bureaucratic capitalism
was that it systematically destroyed the significance of social activities; and following that it
destroyed people’s responsibility and initiative.24 This was not the function of alienation or
instrumentalisation. Rather it was a function of the destruction of meaning. Bureaucratic
14
capitalism and the bureaucratization of the world generated insignificance. As it sucked the
significance from activities in all domains of life, it caused human beings to disengage from life
and substitute for that feckless irresponsibility.
As a consequence of bureaucratization, all kinds of human activities—from work to
politics—stop being signifying activities. They stop being productive of meaning. Castoriadis
explained this is in quasi-Hegelian-cum-Romantic terms.25 Accordingly meaning is a whole.
Social systems that destroy meaning fragment things. They separate activities and things into
parts without recomposing them. Castoriadis, again not quite being able to follow the
implications of his own insight, thought of this carve up at work as being a variation of Adam
Smith’s division of labor. Labor is fragmented on the shop floor and only those who work in the
office can give it meaning. But the bureaus that metastasized everywhere in twentieth-century
society could not synthesize what had been set asunder. 26 Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy
of Right echoes in Castoriadis’ work at this point. And beneath that, the over-tones of the
Romantics are to be heard. But if we forget about Smith, Hegel and Marx, the basic point still
stands. Bureaucratic society cannot synthesize and cannot therefore generate meaning.
Castoriadis doubted therefore that it could ensure its own cohesion.27 The question, though, is
why not? At several points Castoriadis offers a traditionalist account of its failure. At several
crucial junctures through his career he did the same. He says that two centuries of capitalism
had resulted in the collapse of the traditional system of values (religion and the family).
Castoriadis actively disliked religion but regularly defended the family. He appealed to
community and solidarity, classic Romantic tropes, against fragmentation.28 And he thought
that the attempt to substitute ‘rational’ modern values in their place was pathetic. All that one
got from that were streams of platitudes from political racketeers, which is certainly true.
In short, tradition fails in modernity but modern values are laughable. Writing in 1960,
Castoriadis excoriates the vacuous chatter about ‘the new “lay and republican’ morality in
France’ spun by the Radical Socialist party. Nothing changes—think today of the spine-tingling
de-industrializing piffle proffered by the Greens parties or the juvenile inanity of the British
Liberal Party to get a sense of the ridiculous nature of this vacuous values talk. Castoriadis
shrewdly noted the effect of all of this on political participation. Subjected to wall-to-wall
15
poppycock, people disengage from politics. Political parties were once mass organizations with
huge memberships. Castoriadis observes, already in the late 1950s, how people were exiting
from these parties in droves, and from the trade unions, even though by comparison with today
these organizations were still huge relative to the population.29 The former party and union
members decamped into private life. Why? Because they saw that participation was
meaningless. It obliged participants to agree with patently untrue or absurd statements. An
alternate explanation of the cause of this disengagement was that it was an effect of hierarchy.
In his 1911 book on Political Parties, the German sociologist Robert Michels observed what he
called the iron law of oligarchy of the party. The party bosses ruled. Yet in 1911, by comparison
with our own time, those parties still had massive memberships. Perhaps it is true that over the
next century the oligarchs alienated the demos. But then that begs the question: how and why
did that happen? True, party bosses over-ride popular sentiment in political parties of all
persuasions. But then that is politics and the bosses in their own turn are routinely over-ridden
by legislators and presidents and prime ministers. Oligarchs and hierarchs have been around a
very long time and frequently have had mass followings. So why were the oligarchs unable to
retain large memberships in parties and trade unions in the twentieth century? Perhaps this has
to do with the fact that bureaucratization is not simply a synonym for hierarchy and it does not
simply work through alienation or instrumentalisation. Its effects are much more direct and its
causes are much more specific.
Bureaucratization is the production of meaninglessness. A trade union exists to defend
the most vulnerable and the least advantaged of its members. It substitutes the power of
association and combination for the power of skill or capital. Yet as time passed by, trade
unions came increasingly to defend not the most vulnerable and least advantaged but rather
the most dysfunctional and least able. Those who most suffered were other union members
who had to undertake the work of the lazy and the inept. The hard working and the competent
found that the labor market better recognized their skills and wasted their time less than their
union representatives who told fairy tales about capacity, competence, reward and
opportunity. A credibility gap opened up between rhetoric and reality. The nature of
bureaucratic fairy tales is that, as stories, they are unassailable. One is not permitted to
16
question them. Union members found that puncturing holes in ridiculous official tales (like the
tales of class struggle) only caused them to be ticked off. So rather than be chastised for not
believing the nonsense they were served up, they simply gave up their membership in the
leagues of twaddle. Those who remained were either those who believed the credulous fairy
tales or those who most benefited from them. Bureaucratization is successful not because so
many people spontaneously believe the quack mythology that it sprouts (though some do) but
rather because it generates material interests (offices, apparatuses and incomes) that make the
beneficiaries of those interests choose to believe the unbelievable.
An example might help explain this. In 1935 the New York Times introduced to the world
the term ‘boondoggle’. The Times reported that the Franklin Roosevelt’s administration had
spent $3 million on recreation activities for the unemployed including the making of craft
oddments like ‘boon doggles’. The term stuck. It describes waste-of-money projects.
Bureaucratic societies, and the bureaucratic form of capitalism, are an endless producer of
boondoggles. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which managed to prolong the Great Depression in the
United States for many more years than in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, did so by
inventing boondoggle capitalism, otherwise known as state capitalism or bureaucratic
capitalism. From 1931 to the present, this delinquent form of capitalism has flourished. It has
done so by attaching itself to the empty but persuasive signifiers of a bureaucratic society.
These are signifiers that are filled with ersatz meaning. ‘Folk art’ and ‘craft activity’ are
examples. These are typical of the kind of inverse signifiers that are popular in a bureaucratic
society. Industrialism inspires anti-industrial signifiers; sophisticated urbanism recoils with folk
and indigenous symbols. None of these symbols mean anything. They are dislocated from any
society in which they might have a meaning. They have no functional or substantive role in a
modern society. Indeed most of them are complete fictions. They are tokens of a romantic
authenticity that is manufactured in high modern urban locations.
Spending programs readily attach themselves to symbols of this type. Partly this is so
because there is a big audience for them. Because they are empty, they are free floating and
they are easily adapted to all kinds of rhetorical purposes. They come in very handy when policy
architects seek to justify public spending. Max Weber declared that substantive rationality had
17
been replaced by procedural rationality. Ends were replaced with rules. But this is not quite
true. In a lot of cases in fact the rationality of ends was replaced by the rationality of spurious
ends. Romantic symbols (folk, green, people, community, earth symbols) provide servings of
pseudo-meaning in an industrial, urban, machine world. But they are not the only source of
fake meaning. Anti-romantic symbols can be just as usefully deployed to that end. A classic one
is ‘national security’. In 2010 the US Army in Afghanistan spent $119 million annually to lease
3,000 cars at around $40,000 a year per car. The General Services Administration concluded
that the military could have leased and maintained the same number of vehicles for about $60
million a year, half the cost.30 It is not that economic welfare or military contracting are unreal
in themselves (quite the contrary). Nevertheless, accreted layers of fakeness manage to attach
to their body. False, faux, make-believe and sham meaning readily projects itself onto
substantive meaning in bureaucratic modernity. Almost every modern ‘ism’ is filled to brim with
insignificancy. It is as though the twentieth century willed itself to satisfy its meaning needs
with counterfeit meaning of all kinds. The most fake of all of the ideologies were the
authenticity ideologies. Almost anything that is promoted as genuine (genuinely national,
natural, popular) is a sham. When Presidents start talking about ‘the folks’, beware. The hightech money-lenders and bundlers are standing adjacent, off-stage. If patriotism was the last
refuge of the scoundrel in Samuel Johnson’s time, then in our own time authenticity is the last
refuge of ultra-modern ultra-liberal elites as they squeeze persuasive insignificance from the
rock of meaning. One knows that this is something that cannot continue indefinitely.
The capitalism that these elites have created—bureaucratic capitalism—is a capitalism
of feint, affectation, simulation, and put on. It flourishes in a world of fauxitalism in which the
state grants enterprises large amount of money to satisfy popular excitement about one or
other empty signifier that the larger society (for a time) fawns over. The case of the Obama-era
scandal of Solyndra the Californian solar cell manufacturer that in 2009 took a $535 million loan
guarantee from the US federal government and then filed for Chapter Eleven bankruptcy in
2011 is typical and hardly exceptional. In the 1980s, the US Federal Government provided $147
million of taxpayers’ money to the ‘Solar One’ solar energy plant in California, $1.5 billion in
loan guarantees to the Great Plains Synfuels, and $78 million for the New Iberia ethanol plant
18
constructed by Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi’s company Triad America. 31 All of these
schemes went bust. Biofuels, clean energy, and green energy are classic empty signifiers. Each
of them promise the impossible: to match the economy and volume of fossil fuels.
In the last eighty years, we have seen the rise and rise and rise of junk: junk culture, junk
science, junk business, and junk everything. Much of this has come with the imprimatur of the
state. Many of the junk schemes have their source and more especially their funding in the
state. The grant and the subsidy have become powerful mediums for producing junk. The art of
those who apply for the grant and those who give the grant is to generate plausible
meaninglessness. This is meaninglessness that appears to have a meaning. ‘We will produce
energy sufficient to power a modern society from wind or solar sources.’ That is a statement
that at first glance seems to have a meaning. It connects with the human impulse not to foul
the natural environment. Yet all ‘clean’ energy sources are uneconomic. They cost much more
than energy from fossil fuels. These are industries that can only exist if they subsidized. This is a
perfect example of bureaucratic capitalism. It only exists through transfer payments from
taxpayers. It is a corporate welfare economy. A bureaucratic society produces endless examples
of boondoggles. It does this because its inner essence is to produce nothing. The easiest way of
producing nothing, though by no means the only way, is for government to subsidize the
production of nothing. Now a grant-getter cannot literally say to government that the intention
is to produce nothing. Rather what is invariably stated is that what will be produced is of deep,
unfathomable and profound importance to society. Its good is incalculable. Its potential benefit
is stupendous. If the project is not subsidized then terrible harm will follow. If the unemployed
workers do not get their boondoggle folk-art training then they will suffer from alcoholism,
suicide, family break up, and martial stress. Their children will despise them and their parents
will spurn them. The bunkum works for a while, and sometimes for a long time. But eventually
it stops working and the schemes, subsidies and grants are finally closed down, and forever
after nobody talks about the great promise that somehow has mysteriously evaporated.
The number and scale of boondoggles today suggests that bureaucratic capitalism is
more popular now than when Castoriadis was writing in 1960. The alienation model which
Castoriadis had recourse to at the time suggested that people do not like meaninglessness, so
19
they retreat into private life and consume.32 They compensate for lack of meaning with social
irresponsibility.33 They indulge in irrationality. They produce waste. Work becomes a source of
income or security or opportunity for promotion but not a source of intrinsic meaning. In
Weber’s terms, the work ethic declines. The stupid ethic rises. With irresponsibility comes
indifference. With indifference comes a lack of initiative. Nothing matters, and what if it did?
There is some truth in all of this. Yet boondoggle capitalism has had a very long life because one
of the paradoxes of the epoch of the bureaucratic society is that people—to a point—love the
meaninglessness that it generates. Specious meaning can be at times quite popular—even if it
is routinely followed by buyers’ regret. Bureaucracy has spread everywhere into almost every
crack and crevice of social life. People despise it, but they also love it—to a point.
How can one love the state of meaninglessness? How can it be that a society that
requires, like all societies, a core of meaning is able to live off the endless production of
nonsense? Well it can—but it cannot do so forever. For the simulation of meaning has a short
shelf life. Simulation of meaning is to life as kitsch is to art. Kitsch has the superficial
appearance of art, but it is not art. Bureaucratic language appears to convey meaning, but in
reality it does not. If the human imagination rests on the power of analogy, then simulation is
the production of false analogies. Bureaucracy produces the likeness or simulation of services,
products, and knowledge. Yet when looked at closely, the likeness fades to nothing.
Bureaucracy says that it is doing something but in fact it does nothing of substance. The
imagination looks at a tree and sees a house. Bureaucracy says it is providing housing and
produces a likeness of that in the guise of a paper trail of approvals, compliance procedures,
and risk assessments whose medium is a non-language. This non-language does not represent
the production of a house, one of the anchors of a meaningful human existence. Rather it
represents the production of non-sense in the guise of a method without substance and
process indifferent to outcome. The house is the almost accidental by-product of check,
appraisal, approval, sanction, and rule. People disapprove of this. They are irritated by the
delays, the form-filling, the reviews and the compliance steps. But they also approve of it, for
they love the fake meaning that these processes invoke. They loved the ‘planned society’ in the
1950s and 1960s and 1970s and the ‘green society’ of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. That none
20
of these pseudo-societies came to anything but bureaucracy is the point. Socialism and
environmentalism are systems of fake meaning. That Castoriadis rather liked environmentalism
is beside the point. 34 He was right to grasp that modern bureaucracy is the production of
meaninglessness. That it manages to create fake meaning by apparent authentic meanings is
the cunning of its reason, no more. We all get sucked in one way or another. The enduring
question left from this is whether societies can perpetually live off fake meaning if society relies
on the production of substantial meaning. It is doubtful. If so, then what is the future of
substantive meaning in a world mesmerized by fauxitalism?
21
References
James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press,
Midland Books, 1960 [1941]).
Cornelius Castoriadis, Political and Social Writings Volume 2 1955-1960 (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1988).
Cornelius Castoriadis, World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Pyschoanalysis and the
Imagination (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).
Cornelius Castoriadis, The Castoriadis Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).
G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson 2007 [1925]).
Daniel Fisher, ‘A Brief History of Energy Boondoggles’, Forbes Magazine, November 24, 2008.
Irving Kristol, ‘The”New Class” Revisited’, Wall Street Journal, May 31, 1979.
Deidre McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2010).
Thomas K. McCraw, Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007), p. 94.
Joseph Schumpeter, Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical, And Statistical Analysis of the
Capitalist Process, Volumes 1 and 2 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939).
Adam Weinstein, ‘The All-Time 10 Worst Military Contracting Boondoggles’, Mother Jones,
September 2, 2011.
22
Notes
1
Deidre McCloskey in Bourgeois Dignity (2010) proposes that around 1700 a decisive shift occurred in the
north-western Europe in favor of innovation, setting in train a history of scientific, technical, mercantile and finally
(and decisively) industrial discovery and application that permanently changed the nature of economics.
2
‘The only cases where we could speak genuinely of “disorder” are, I think, those of “old systems that are
in crisis” or “crumbling”. So, for instance, with the late Roman World—or many Third World societies today. In the
first case, a new “unifying principle”, a new magma of social imaginary significations, eventually emerged with
Christianity… In the second case, that of Third World countries, no new “unifying principle” seems to emerge…’
See Castoriadis, ‘The Imaginary: Creation in the Social-Historical Domain’ [1981], World in Fragments (1997), p. 16.
3
‘The crisis of the family today does not consist only, and not so much, in its statistical fragility. What is at
issue is the crumbling and disintegration of the traditional roles—man, woman, parents, children—and the
consequences thereof: the formless disorientation of new generations.’ Yes, agreed Castoriadis, there were
moments of legitimate emancipation in the undoing of traditional roles. ‘But the ambiguities of its effects have
long been noted. The more time passes, the more one is justified in asking oneself whether this process is
expressed more by a blossoming forth of new ways of living than by sheer disorientation and anomie.’ See ‘The
Crisis of Western Societies’ [1982], The Castoriadis Reader (1997), p. 259.
4
‘No doubt, heteronomous societies have created immortal works—or, quite simply, a countless host of
beautiful objects. And already, this statement shows—from a democratic perspective, as a matter of fact—the
untenability of the historical proscriptions today’s new fanatics want to issue concerning cultural matters.
Following the logic of certain feminists, for example, I ought to cast out the Passion According to Saint John not
only because it was composed by a dead and white male but because it gives expression to a religious faith that, in
my own view, is alienating.’ See ‘Culture in a Democratic Society’ [1994] in The Castoriadis Reader (1997), p. 341.
5
Joseph Schumpeter, Business Cycles (1939).
6
Castoriadis, ‘Reflections on “Rationality” and “Development”’ [1976], Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy
(1991), p. 185.
7
Which led the conservative Castoriadis to comment: ‘Let us put aside that which is perhaps the most
important aspect of the pill, the psychical aspect, of which nobody talks: What might happen to human beings
should they begin to see themselves as absolute masters over the decision to bequeath or not bequeath life,
without having to pay a thing for this “power” (beyond two dollars a month).’ And now not even two dollars a
month: the 2012 US Democratic Party and its marquee fool, Sandra Fluke, demanded that employers with religious
affiliations offer health insurance plans that provide free birth control. A graduate of Cornell gender studies and
Georgetown law, Fluke’s views are a clear sign of an asinine political elite that not only retails frivolities as policy—
and would therefore like to exclude reasonable conscience-exceptions out of some kind of over-wrought kitsch
moralizing absolutism—but that can no longer grasp the larger implications of what its foot-stamping demands.
Fluke is a classic political ladder-climber in a bureaucratic society. By the age of 31, she had co-founded the New
York Statewide Coalition for Fair Access to Family Court, was a member of the Manhattan Borough President’s
Taskforce on Domestic Violence and multiple other New York City and New York State coalitions, the recipient of a
Women Lawyers of Los Angeles’ Fran Kandel Public Interest Grant, and had served as president of the Georgetown
Law Students for Reproductive Justice. Bureaucratic societies dress up such political careerism in the garb of the
needy, the vulnerable and the afflicted. This is done in a manner that is both cynical and naive at the same time.
The presumed public good of such careers is in reality just one long tedious addition to the curriculum vitae—itself
an ever-evolving, ever-expanding tool of self-promotion in bureaucratic societies. In these societies, and in
loathsome ways, activism readily turns into a career and such careers, reliant as they invariably are on the public
purse, are no more and no less a vehicle for redistributing money from the poor to the gilded ultra-affluent upper
middle classes for whom anything like real work is an offense against their humanity. See Castoriadis, ‘Reflections
on “Rationality” and “Development”’, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy (1991), p. 194
8
Castoriadis, ‘Reflections on “Rationality” and “Development”’ [1976], Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy
(1991), p. 186.
9
They argued about Marxism and Bolshevism. See Thomas K. McCraw, Prophet of Innovation (2007), p. 94.
23
10
This was brilliantly and repeatedly argued by G.K. Chesterton, one of the greatest thinkers of the
twentieth century. On the paradoxical foundation of Christianity, see for example Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
(2007 [1925]).
11
Castoriadis, ‘Modern Capitalism and Revolution’ [1960-1961] in Political and Social Writings Volume 2
(1988), p. 271.
12
Many neo-conservative intellectuals began life as American Trotskyists. These figures had taken seriously
the Trotskyist opposition to the entropic Soviet Union, so much so that by the 1970s and 1980s they were
embracing the idea of a strong American military capable of defeating the Soviets. They subsequently applied
similar notions to reversing the entropic slide of states in the Middle East. One of the initial points of intersection
and crystallisation of these forces was the Trotskyist organizer Max Schachtman. His first step on a path that would
take many intellectuals from American Trotskyism to neo-conservatism was to leave the Socialist Workers Party in
1940. He steadily moved across the political spectrum toward the distinctive brand of American anti-communist
Social Democracy. Other key figures included Schachtman-ally James Burnham, Burnham’s friend the philosopher
Sidney Hook, Irving Kristol (who was a Shermanite—see below), Michael Harrington (a Schachmanite till the
1970s), Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Albert Wohlstetter, and the Schachtmanite aides to the influential US Democratic
Senator Henry Jackson (such as Elliot Abrams), and so on. Kirkpatrick, the Reagan-era Ambassador to the United
Nations, was a member of the Schachtmanite Young People’s Socialist League and later joined Schachtman’s Social
Democrats, USA at whose conferences Paul Wolfowitz, later US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence in the
George W. Bush administration, spoke in the 1970s. Kirkpatrick did her PhD. under Franz Neumann, the Frankfurt
School Social Democrat. Albert Wohlstetter, a Schachmanite in the 1940s, was a very important nuclear weapons
strategist, Paul Wolfowitz’s PhD. supervisor and mentor of Richard Perle. Henry Jackson employed Wolfowitz and
Perle as advisors in his office in the 1970s, along with Abram Shulsky, a student of Leo Strauss. Others who moved
in the Social Democrat USA milieu included labor leaders George Meany, Albert Shanker and Lane Kirkland, Paul
Nitze, Eugene Rostow, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Max Kampelman, Richard Pipes, Seymour Martin Lipset, Bayard
Rustin, and Norman Podhoretz. Another key figure, “Sherman”, was the non-de-plume of the Berkeley sociologist
Philip Selznick, who was in venerable Trotskyist sectarian style an ex-member and factional dissenter from Max
Shachtman’s Workers Party (WP). Sherman’s supporters included Gertrude Himmelfarb, Seymour Martin Lipset,
Martin Diamond, Herbert Garfinkel, and Irving Kristol. More recent effects of the intersection between Trotskyism
and American foreign policy is powerfully evident in the works of the left Social Democratic critic of Islamist terror
Paul Berman (an admirer of another dissenting Trotskyist, C.R.L. James), Stephen Schwartz (a neo-conservative
critic of the Saudi regime and also a one-time Trotskyist), and not least of all the journalist Christopher Hitchens,
former Trotskyist and eloquent defender of regime change in Iraq. It should also be noted in passing that the Iraqi
Trotskyist Kaan Makiya wrote by far the best book on Saddam’s Iraq: The Republic of Fear. The complex family tree
sketched above and the story of the remarkable assimilation of Trotsky into mainstream American politics has yet
to be properly told. Most accounts of the origins of the neo-conservatives go little way towards understanding
such curious phenomena as the intersection between quite a few of the ex-Trotskyists and the political philosophy
of Leo Strauss (Irving Kristol was an admirer and Martin Diamond became a Straussian) or such uncanny footnotes
to history as the fact that Christopher Hitchens was in Washington State to give a Henry Jackson memorial lecture
on the day of September 11, 2001.
13
James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (1960 [1941]).
14
‘Fusion of the economy with the state, expansion of the state functions to comprise also control of the
economy, offers, whether or not the managers individually recognize it, the only available means, on the one hand
for making the economic structure workable again after its capitalist breakdown, on the other for putting the
managers in the position of the ruling class.’ Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (1960 [1941]), p. 127.
Burnham’s notion that managerial control could reverse the business cycle or replace the profit motive proved not
to be true, but the vision of a class set upon shifting the locus of sovereignty from parliamentary assemblies to the
administrative bureaus of an expanded state was spot on, as was the prediction of managerial hostility to
entrepreneurial capitalism, freedom and initiative.
15
Irving Kristol, ‘The”New Class” Revisited’, Wall Street Journal, May 31, 1979, p. 24.
16
See, e.g. ‘The Crisis of Western Societies’ [1982], The Castoriadis Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 258.
24
17
Castoriadis, ‘Modern Capitalism and Revolution’ [1960-1961] in Political and Social Writings Volume 2
(1988), p. 271-281.
18
Castoriadis, ‘Modern Capitalism and Revolution’, p. 272.
19
Castoriadis, ‘Modern Capitalism and Revolution’, p. 272.
20
Castoriadis, ‘Modern Capitalism and Revolution’, p. 273.
21
Castoriadis, ‘Modern Capitalism and Revolution’, p. 273.
22
Against this, Castoriadis often referred to the classical Greek tradition of direct speaking, aka parrhesia.
See for example ‘The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy’, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy (1991), pp. 107,
113.
23
Castoriadis, ‘Modern Capitalism and Revolution’, p. 273.
24
Castoriadis, ‘Modern Capitalism and Revolution’, p. 273.
25
Castoriadis, ‘Modern Capitalism and Revolution’, pp. 273-275.
26
Castoriadis, ‘Modern Capitalism and Revolution’, p. 275.
27
Castoriadis, ‘Modern Capitalism and Revolution’, p. 275.
28
Castoriadis, ‘Modern Capitalism and Revolution’, pp. 274, 276.
29
Castoriadis, ‘Modern Capitalism and Revolution’, p. 280.
30
Adam Weinstein, ‘The All-Time 10 Worst Military Contracting Boondoggles’, Mother Jones, September 2,
2011.
31
Daniel Fisher, ‘A Brief History of Energy Boondoggles’, Forbes Magazine, November 24, 2008.
32
Castoriadis, ‘Modern Capitalism and Revolution’, pp. 278, 280.
33
Castoriadis, ‘Modern Capitalism and Revolution’, p. 280.
34
Castoriadis, ‘Reflections on “Rationality” and “Development”’ [1976], Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy
(1991), pp. 199-218.
25